can you explain? What does survivorship bias have to do with that
this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2025
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Herbaceous gymnosperms were likely outcompeted by early angiosperms because they were tasty.
It's an old WW1 or WW2 story. They were constantly trying to improve their planes and thus analyzed the returning planes to figure out where they needed more protection. However, as the story goes, they did not account for the fact that the bullet holes where only in non-critical spots, because the planes that got hit on critical spots did not come back.
thanks! but I meant the gymnosperms
What does this mean?
The image is a reference to this analysis done in World War II, which might seem to suggest that the planes need more armour on the wings and tail, but actually shows that these areas aren't important and that the engines and cockpit need armour if the plane is to survive to make it back to base (where the stats are correlated).
The surviving planes showed a bias in the data that leads to an incorrect conclusion, just like the surviving woody gymnosperms makes it seem like there weren't non-woody gymnosperms.
only the woody things survive, because they're woody and thus pretty difficult to put in a salad
People put pine nuts in salads all the time, and rodents do as well. It's also one of the 5 ingredients of pesto.
And why the airplane?
...what kind of pine nuts are you eating? the ones i've eaten are just seeds, not made of wood. i wouldn't want bark or wood chips in a salad, would you?
the plane is a classic example of survivor bias: only the planes that didn't get shot in critical areas returned, but at first the response was to add armor to the places that got shot the most, which is the wrong action since clearly if they got shot that much it didn't really matter for the survival of the plane.
The pine nuts are the seeds that are inside the pine cones. The pinecone being wooden clearly didn't stop us from prying them apart and eating it's content
Survivorship bias.